We now have the results of the third edition of the Glider Awards. Negonation gives the “Glider” awards to the “most valuable collaborators”. There are 3 prizes, each of €1,000. Two are awarded by majority votes by the collaborators and the employees of Negonation choose the third. The time frame of the awards varies and normally coincides with the completion of a release (approximately every 3 months).

DavidCalavera ran away with the 3rd edition of the Glider Prizes. It was a unanimous decision – without exception, all his peers voted for him. During this release, David Calavera has been responsible for coding the signature front-end (Ruby on Rails), integrating it with the new signature back-end (Java) and, in the same step, added various usability enhancements and prepared the code for integration with the billing module. David worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas and together they have accomplished the following feat: It’s now possible to sign in Tractis with the principal browsers (Explorer, Firefox and Safari) and Operating Systems (Windows, GNU-Linux and Mac). Thanks David.

The second prize-winner is Ernesto Jímenez. Enrensto has focused on refactoring various parts of the application, RESTification, unification of the layouts and various tasks designed to simplify the application and “beautify” the code. Ernesto has collaborated intensely and constantly for the last year and his colleagues therefore wanted to acknowledge his contribution: Ernesto has won a prize in each edition of the Glider Prizes. To stop him “spoiling” future Glider editions, we’ve decided to make him a full-time Negonation employee! Welcome aboard!

The Negonation employee prize has been awarded to Juanse Pérez, our Internationalization expert for his work on FIT. FIT is an open-source “internationalization for human beings” project that we started at the first Conferencia Rails Hispana (Hispanic Rails conference) and is being closely followed by various startups with an international vocation. In the first quarter of 2007, Juanse developed the initial code (watch video), created the mailing list, submitted the code to Rubyforge and the Google Summer of Code (shame they didn’t accept us, but maybe next year…), set up Trac and a demo on the generously donated Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) servers. A just recognition for an impressive level of activity.

A special mention goes to Jean-Michel Garnier. “JM” has become the testing evangelist of the project and has worked hard (Trac documentation, one-to-one meetings, emails, etc…) to inoculate the virus and the goodness of TDD in the team.

Although yesterday we announced the prizes on the developers mailing list and the congratulations duly followed, we had to make it public too. Congratulations to the winners!